How to lose friends and infuriate people

The release of the Spider platform from AMD has generated a lot of reviews and speculation as to AMD's long term quad core plans. We've seen the numbers, heard how lovely Lake Tahoe is and how two out of three ain't bad. There was another side to this launch, which a lot of the sites haven't really expressed, but The Tech Report has broken the silence. AMD made some rather questionable moves in the lead up to this launch, from the obvious that you may have figured out, free tickets to Lake Tahoe, to seriously limiting the time and overall access to the new hardware. AMD's PR team, which has just undergone a major shuffle, performed on par with the Phenom it's self.

"We choose to work with companies like AMD only because it suits our purposes, which are to bring fair and thorough reviews

to our readers in as timely a manner as possible. Generally, we've found that playing nice with chipmakers has been the

best path to that goal, even though we often have to agree to wait for launch day to publish a review. But we don't have to

make that deal, and I see no reason to do so if we can't get our hands on the product. We could always go the "gray market"

route, acquiring a chip from other sources and publishing test results as soon as possible. In many cases, that would mean

having hard numbers before the launch date, even if they were from pre-release hardware."